


i bear no witness

by gayprophets



Series: Everyday Kepler [5]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Animal Death, Body Horror, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Horror, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Character Complexity, Character Study, Discussion of Mental Health, Dissociation, Family Dynamics, Found Family, GRIFFIN blew up my SPOT and i EDITED to KEEP IT CANON COMPLIANT, Horror, Mental Health Issues, Mental Illness, Moral Lessons, Morality, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Panic Attacks, Perhaps a little above or more well described than canon typical, Police Brutality adjacent, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Rated For Violence, Spoilers for ep 28-29, Surreal, edited again for more canon compliancy, fuck the fbi, fuckin a this is just a bunch of legit life advice masquerading as a fanfic, this is STILL CANON COMPLIANT!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-21
Updated: 2019-06-21
Packaged: 2020-05-16 00:49:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19307266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gayprophets/pseuds/gayprophets
Summary: Mama had seen the top of Mount Kepler raise into the air and known, suddenly, just how small her life was. She’d been aware of that fact before, killing abomination after abomination, insignificant to the endless stream of time, just another face that happened to stick around a little longer than the rest. But she’d felt it then, as what seemed like the hand of God reached down from the sky and scooped up the earth, as though to forge Lilith and Adam once more from its clay.And then it fell.-A character study of Mama, from her arrest to her conversation with Agent Haynes, with a few looks at her past in between.





	i bear no witness

**Author's Note:**

> Please note the tags - this deals with a lot of themes that can be distressing depending on your sensitivity level and past experiences.  
> Some of this relates back to the previous works in the series but they are not required, you can understand this in its entirety without knowing anything about them.  
> Only half of this got really read thru and edited, feel free to point out any mistakes or fucked up sentences.  
> (also i promise stern isn't as awful as he is in the first part people do shit while panicking just keep reading)

Mama had seen the top of Mount Kepler raise into the air and known, suddenly, just how small her life was. She’d been aware of that fact before, killing abomination after abomination, insignificant to the endless stream of time, just another face that happened to stick around a little longer than the rest. But she’d felt it then, as what seemed like the hand of God reached down from the sky and scooped up the earth, as though to forge Lilith and Adam once more from its clay.

And then it fell.

She was in her truck by then, having just gotten to the center of town, watching through the rearview mirror as it barreled along, ripping trees like a mouth tears through flesh, the terrible red smoke following like a bloodtrail. The gouge it leaves gapes open behind her, a mouth open in an endless shriek of agony, heard in the tons of rock pummeling the earth with fury so loud it feels like a living thing, enraged.

The ground shakes under her truck until the mountaintop slides to a halt.

She throws the truck in reverse and gets as close to the site of the disaster as she can, pulls people out of the rubble one at a time. Some things are ablaze from the fiery scrape of metal on metal, a few exploded tanks of propane. Her eyes sting. The shapeshifter as Ned - fuck, _Ned_ \- had done a good job of clearing town, which downsized the number of casualties significantly. Small blessings. There’s only a few homebodies trapped under thrown rubble and hiding behind things, frozen into place with terror. She helps them free, gripping some splintered lumber with both hands and heaving upwards, murmuring at a few until they wake up enough to run, then venturing further onwards. She hasn’t found any bodies yet. A chunk of granite the size of her truck sits solemnly in the middle of the highway. Her path back up to the Lodge has been completely cut off.

Blue lights glint off the snow, sirens wailing. She turns slowly, coughing as she inhales more smoke - real, not the magical red - to watch Agent Stern’s blacked out vehicle skid to a stop just a few feet from her. She thinks, for a second, about running.

“Madeline Cobb!” he shouts, launching himself out of his car and holding his service pistol with _horrible_ trigger discipline. She thinks she’ll forgive him for it. It’s been quite a day.

“That’d be me,” she tells him, “I got my shotgun in my coat.”

He throws her against the hood of his car. They both seem to be aware that she’s letting him do it. He’s breathing hard like he’s trying to operate through a panic attack, and he holsters his weapon before removing hers.

“Got a lotta knives, too,” Mama says, though less than she’d usually have. She didn’t exactly have time to equip her usual gear. “Let me - Stern, there’s still people -,”

“You are under arrest,” he says, reaching further under her leather duster and taking the hunting knife from her belt, feeling through her pockets and removing the switchblade and brass knuckles, the push dagger, shotgun shells. “For obstructing a federal investigation, harboring - fuck, _fugitives,_ fuck!”

“That’s it?” Mama asks, laughing. “Don’t forget the sawed-off, that right there’s illegal. You missed the boot knife.”

Stern slaps the cuffs on her, then removes the boot knife. “Do you have anything else you’d like to confess to?” he asks. He sounds calm, suddenly, blank. She gets it, honestly, the sheer electrified energy of your first face to face encounter with the unexplainable melting into the yawning void of order, _this is what I have to do next to survive this._ She’s been there. She lives there nowadays for the most part, holds up that horrible calm like a shield.

“I do,” she says as he leads her around the car to the backseat, and then she whips her head back into his nose, feels it break into her skull, sets sparks flying across her vision, makes her ears ring. Agent Stern yells in shock and pain, staggering backwards.

“Assaultin’ a federal officer,” she says, once she’s organized her jolted brain to the point where she can speak again. “There’s people who need _help_ , Agent Stern, let me help them and then you can arrest me.” She’s dragging her feet, fighting him now, because if he goes up to the Lodge next there’s no telling if Barclay will still be there with the rest of the Sylphs or not, and she needs to buy him some fucking time to clear the place and wipe it down. They have plans on plans on plans and all her residents keep bug-out bags in their closets, but this particular situation wasn’t one they’d discussed. “I’ll go quiet and easy, promise, just _let me do my fuckin’ job_ -,”

_“Of what!?”_ he shouts, wet and nasal through his broken nose. “What, pray tell, is your _job_?!” She puts her back into it now, plants her feet. Her mother once said that she could outpull a team of oxen if she put her mind to it, which was definitely a chide on her stubborn pride, but Mama feels it in her gut. She could drag their little hooves all the way down the street and back again with the fire burning inside her right now.

“Protectin’ Kepler,” she tells him. Agent Stern rams his shoulder into her back, knocking her forward a foot, so she drags him back two of them. The back of her head hurts like a son of a bitch, and so do her ribs from where they’d hit his car, and her ankle is feeling pretty cranky too, now that she thinks about it.  “There are people dyin’, please. I have to help.”

She can see Ned, looking up at the stars.

Her ankle gets the better of her after another long minute of push and pull, rocking dangerously under her and sending a bolt of pain up her leg. Agent Stern stuffs her into the cold plastic backseat, hitches her handcuffs to the bar in front of her.

He stands there for a moment, panting. Blood is pouring out of both of his nostrils, over his lips and down his neck, into his suit collar. His pale skin is going grey in the dying light, hair awry and suit rumpled. His face can’t decide between blank and a feral snarl. Someone runs past them, crying, and she goes to gesture at them, succeeding only in rattling her cuffs.

“Please,” she tries one more time, searching for the softness she’s seen in him late at night, the pause Aubrey had given him earlier, the part of him that ran down half dressed to help Kepler when the sinkhole opened up. “There’s people who need help. Doin’ this is only hurtin’ them. Please, let me do my job.”

Stern laughs like it hurts him, mostly wild air, chest heaving. His teeth are stained pink. “Well, Miss Cobb,” he tells her, “I’m afraid my job is a bit fucking bigger than yours.”

He slams the door in her face.

* * *

They take the tramway up to the Lodge, Stern breathing through his mouth and handcuffing her to the bike rack outside the The Lodge, which is is cold and quiet. It hurts to see but it’s better than everybody being there when they turned up.

Stern kicks the door on his way out, having gone in to check the building over. She wants to shout at him for it, but she finds that her voice is all gone, withered up like a rose in the frost. She is so, very, _very_ tired.

“What the flying _fuck_ was in your basement?” Stern asks her once they're back down the mountain and in his car. He looks panicked again, and he’s already stopped once to puke on the side of the road. Amateur. “There are clawmarks on the fucking _ceiling!”_ She can tell he’s trying not to sound hysterical, but he’s missing it by a mile.

_Of course they’re on the ceiling_ , she wants to tell him, _that’s my creepy murder basement_. If they were on the floor she’d be keeping a fucking dog down there, not her best friend who went rabid in a wasteland, kidnapped and caged. Her tongue feels like lead in her mouth, and she can’t quite drag out the words. At least someone took Thacker with them - she’d hate it if Stern had gone down there and died, left her to chew off her hands so she could bleed out in the snow rather than starve to death outside her own home.

Granted, she would have frozen before it came to that. Or other FBI agents would have found her. Whichever.

They’re driving now, somewhere east. Mama rests her head against the window and watches the flashbulb flicker of the lights, cold, hateful blue, eerie and alien as they echo off of the pines that whip past, until she has to shut her eyes.

She gets transferred over to somebody else after they exit the quiet zone, who hums along to the radio playing the same kind of soft indie that Dani listens to and tells her, “I don’t know what you did, but everything will go much smoother if you cooperate.”

“Okay,” she tells him. “Lemme call my lawyer.” He laughs.

* * *

 She remembers smiling in her first mugshot. She’d been protesting, been in the crowd that threw a brick at some cops, hadn’t moved fast enough, gotten caught. She and her lawyer said she didn’t do it, and somebody else claimed it for whatever reason, so she went and got herself arrested at a different protest.

She thinks about that halfbrick, sometimes, sees its arc in her sleep, watches it in reverse from impact to airborn to her hand, the whiteknuckle terror and righteous fury. She’d done things like that before, but never on that level. She’s always been walking girls to classes when boys wouldn’t leave them alone, spray painting RAPIST in eye bleed yellow on the sides of men’s cars, standing like a redwood at the subway stations, watching other women wander up to her, smile, stand in her shade. She’s never regretted being big, tall, strong, she could find plenty of softness in the hugs of the girls she walked from the art building back to their dorms. She knows she’s a bonfire of a woman, Athena bursting from Zeus’ skull, ready for war. _We should throw more bricks at cops_ , she thinks, grinning for the camera, _we’d get shit done a lot faster_.

If you’re going to get arrested for a cause, you better be proud enough of the work you did for it to smile about it. Mama’s plenty proud of what she’s done, but she knows it was the very least she could do. She should have tried harder, worked smarter, planned better, made the world safer, sooner. She should be there with them right now.

She should have run the second she heard sirens.

They photograph everything about her next, starting with her hands. They take note of what’s left of Ned trapped beneath her fingernails, running swabs along the lines of her hands for DNA. Someone pulls out a sliver of wood half an inch long from the meat of her palm that she hadn’t noticed was there. Bright, fresh blood bubbles over the old brown of Ned’s arterial spatter. She’d known from the sight of the color, before setting eyes on the placement of the bullet, that it was over then. The burst of liver red, thick like ectoplasm, spraying out of him like a river.

She put pressure anyways, said his name. Knelt in it as it spread warm beneath her, felt it cover her neck and chest in little drops of heat. His heart stopped beating under her fingertips. She felt him go.

It’s been a while since she’d felt that absence appear, the sudden hollowing of a body, the vacating of the soul. She couldn’t define the feeling if one asked, but she knows it intimately, like a lover’s touch. She wouldn’t wish it on anything.

“Can I wash my hands?” she asks. No one replies.

They take her clothes next, and while she’s not upset to see them go - they reek of sweat and smoke and are stiff in places with blood - she knows what it means. Wherever she is, they’re not letting her go for quite a while. She doesn’t get to shower, has to put on her new outfit over the blood that’s dried in her leg hair. Grey sweatpants, grey canvas slippers, white underwear, white sports bra, white t-shirt. She feels properly degraded, dehumanized, anonymized. The little hole in her palm quits bleeding and scabs over.

“Can I please wash my hands?” she asks again, being lead to another room for more processing.

“Do you have to use the restroom?” one of the women leading her asks.

“No,” Mama says, shaking her head, which she can feel is a mistake the second the word leaves her mouth. “I just - I want to wash my hands.”

The woman doesn’t respond.

They wipe the blood off the pads of her fingers so they can fingerprint her, but leave the rest alone. It’s starting to itch and flake off in patches. Mama is reminded of the coyote that wandered up to the Lodge a year back, in the afternoon, broad daylight, Dani in the garden freezing up when it walked in amongst the tomatoes and borage. It had sarcoptic mange - one eye gone, just a swollen mass of pink flesh, oozing slickly, and it had eaten a hole into its own hindquarters. Its ears had calcified with sores, and she could see every bone and tendon shifting as it shuffled into a bright patch of sunshine, laying down in the cucumbers. It didn’t have fur, just rough dry skin - save for a thin greasy strip atop its shoulders, where it couldn’t reach to scratch. Dani had waited, locked in place and unable to move until it had walked by her, and then she’d sprinted inside the Lodge, slamming the door with a bang and screaming for her and Barclay. Its skin flaked off as it worried at itself, writhing against the dirt.

It had growled at Mama when she walked up to it, thin face creasing and teeth glinting, but it didn’t run. Sores at the corners of its mouth cracked.

She raised her rifle.

Dani had cried, cried like the world was ending, shaking in terror in Barclay’s arms. _It looked wrong_ , she said, _it didn’t look right, nothing living should look like that. It looked dead already, Mama. It looked dead already_. And then - _why did you have to shoot it?_ Mama didn’t know how to explain - truly the kindest sort of cruelty, to take the suffering of a wild animal and bring it to an end. She didn’t know how to say that she’d prefer do it herself rather than let nature continue with its course, leave the thing to scream and bleed and crawl until its struggling heart stuttered to a halt, from exposure, from hunger, from infection. Killing with an empathy that the earth lacks - not that it is inherently cruel, but that it does not have the capacity to be kind.

_I’ve got it_ , Barclay mouthed at her, so she had just briefly bundled Dani into her arms, kissed her on the head, handed her back over to him, and went back outside to deal with the mess.

Dani wouldn’t go near the garden even after Mama had gotten the carcass into a garbage bag, brought it to Fish and Game for proper disposal, gathered up the earth where the coyote had rolled and scratched and oozed and died, buried it in the woods. Her sanctuary had been violated. Mama spent a week with Barclay, ripping out the plants it had touched, putting up a better fence, harvesting what Dani’s fear would leave to rot. It’d taken a month more before Dani could be out there without someone else by her side.

The blood flakes off more around her cuffs, her legs itching, out of reach under the table.

She’s sitting in a grey room at a grey table with grey walls, the fluorescent lights whispering to each other above her head. The chain of her cuffs is slipped through a ring in the table in front of her. There’s a two way mirror on one wall, next to the door. She stares at it, her face alien and disconnected. Does she really look this tired, worn? Is her hair really that shade of steel? Is that how her mouth moves when she frowns, when she scowls? Time goes swift and slow all at once, and her body sings with a thousand little pains. She lets herself drift.

* * *

 She falls asleep at some point, because she wakes up hours or minutes or seconds later to the door clicking open, and a smiling agent walks in. He’s dressed in black slacks and a short sleeved blue v-neck shirt, sensible shoes that lace up enough to run in.

“Well!” he says, hands on his hips. “You had a very eventful day, didn’t you Miss Cobb?”

His lips seem to stretch oddly around the words, plastic, and his smile shows too many teeth, far too straight and unnaturally white. He looks like an FBI agent in the way Stern never did, a perfect automation of patriotism.

“I want a lawyer,” Mama says, slowly moving in the general direction of upright. She would try to look serious, but her face feels slack, blank. She couldn’t paste an expression onto it even if she worked at it. It’s dangerous, feeling this empty - she knows from experience that the longer she feels nothing when she should be feeling something, the worse it is when the emotions kick back in.

He pulls out the folding chair across from her and sits down. “I think you and I both know you can’t have one.”

She sits up the rest of the way. “My Miranda rights and I think a little differently.”

“Not in manners of national security they don’t,” the agent replies. “We have to operate a little differently when we, oh, say, get attacked by an alien world. Aliens that _you_ seem to have been harboring!”

Mama doesn’t reply. The agent drums his fingers, loudly, but she doesn’t look at him, staring at her hands. The blood is like mud around her nail beds, seeping up over the backs of her hands. She can feel her head listing sideways, but she’s too tired to keep it upright.

“You seem tired,” the agent says, “Coffee?”

“Sleep,” she replies. “Sleep and a lawyer. And I want to wash my hands. What happened to my guests? The ones at Amnesty Lodge?”

“Can we get her a coffee?” the agent asks the window, which gives a single tap in reply. “You can take a shower after we chat, so let's get to it, shall we? I’m Special Agent Kwasnik, you’re Madeline Cobb, and _you_ have been up to some things that you _should not have been doing_.”

Mama sits back in her chair, studying him. He’s overwhelmingly relaxed, legs spread wide and his spine sure and straight. She rearranges her limbs until she’s mirroring him as near as she can manage. “What’re y’all chargin’ me with, Agent?” she asks.

“Lets see,” he says, and starts counting off on his fingers. “Aiding and abetting - well, I suppose we could call it illegal immigration, harboring - again, I suppose we’d say fugitives, obstruction of justice, obstruction of a federal investigation, and, well, treason!” Kwasnik sits back in his chair. “We’ve had to retrofit some of this, obviously - it’s hard to define things that nobody’s done before! You’ve got _quite_ a list there, Miss Cobb!”

She’s surprised not to hear assaulting an officer or resisting arrest on there, because she _definitely_ did both of those. “Quite a list,” she echoes. Maybe Stern isn’t quite as much of a bastard as she thought.

There’s a tap on the door, and it swings open. Another agent drops off a styrofoam cup of coffee and hurries back out. Mama rattles her handcuffs pointedly.

“That’s for after we chat,” Kwasnik says. “Anything you know -,”

Mama sighs, lays her head down on her arms again, and tunes him out.

She drifts in and out of a terrible half-sleep, the lights too bright and the position too uncomfortable for anything deeper than dozing. The agent talks at her for a few minutes. He’s way too awake for whatever hellish hour in the morning it is, acting like he’s making a much deeper impact on her than he is. He says things like _your duty to your country_ and _helping your government_. She wants to tell him that she’s never been big on her country or the government, the oligarchical imperialist sham of a democracy that rules them lacks appeal, but she’s just too exhausted.

He leaves after a few more minutes of this with a frustrated sigh and a few angry words about _being a patriot._ The coffee next to her arm slowly goes from exuding warmth to leaching her body heat.

She dreams, somewhat. Mostly they’re just memories, cut up like little strips of film and spliced together to make shuddering, incomprehensible scenes of horror. Mike’s car has just exploded, and she's dragged his body out, screaming, her flesh bubbling in the flames as she puts pressure on a gunshot wound to his heart, which spurts blood into her eyes with every _beat, beat, beat._ The fire vanishes, and she looks up to see herself, 20 years younger, standing in front of a mirror in an abandoned department store in the dark. She was lean back then, weight cut down to muscle and not much else, a body of necessity.

She’s holding a black and yellow flashlight in one hand, and off to the right there’s the tangled corpse of an abomination - a barn owl’s body stretched out like taffy, easily 12 feet long, a jagged beak that extends down six of those, fleshy tubers for feathers. It has an iron spear launched directly down its slick gullet, still oozing black liquid, and little white puffs of light melt away into the empty racks. As Mama watches, her younger self opens her mouth. All her teeth fall out, plinking onto the grungy white tiled floor. Mama walks up behind her, looks over her own shoulder, and her younger self pries Mama’s jaw open and rips out all of her incisors, canines, bicuspids, molars, one by one. She slots them neatly into place within her own empty gums, shining healthy pink.

“I need these,” Her younger self says. Blood drips down Mama’s chin. This self, her hair only just frosting over grey, turns into Dani, feral, gunning for her throat.

The door bangs open off the wall and Mama jerks upright with a yelp, her handcuffs yanking her wrists back down to the table with bruising force when she throws her hands up to try and protect her jugular.

A man slams the door behind him - someone new, not Kwasnik. He’s bald, muscular, in a suit with no tie, holding a manilla folder stuffed with papers. Mama’s heart ticks down from its racing pace into something slow, deep, steady, settling in for a fight.

Mike’s car had burned through in moments. She’d dragged his body nowhere - there was nothing left to carry.

“I’m still waitin’ for my lawyer,” she tells the new agent, just to be difficult.

“As Kwasnik told you, you won’t be getting one,” he says. He pulls out the chair, being sure to make the legs squeal against the floor. Mama feels roughly like she’s been hit by a truck, less tired than before - she thinks she’s managed maybe four, five hours of sleep - but not any more well rested.

“Nothin’ I say can be used against me in a trial, then,” she says, and winks at him. “Will you tell me what happened to my guests? Or is there some sorta manager I can talk to ‘round here?”

He gives her a look that almost makes her laugh, like he actually believes she’s stupid enough to believe that this will ever go to a jury of her peers, that she thinks she can complain to a _manager_ . Currently, she’s hoping for a bullet to the head rather than a pair of concrete shoes. She just wants a death that’s humane. Kind cruelty doesn’t apply to people, _never_ has, _never_ will, and she’s willing to fight it out with anyone who believes it does, but she supposes in the case of a government agency that’s the best they could give her. A bullet between the eyes compared to breathing water in an ocean compared to sitting in a cell in the empty dark, waiting for a release that comes only when her heart quits beating.

Yeah, she’ll take the bullet.

He opens the folder.

“Jocelyn Pel,” he says, sliding out a photo of a young woman, too pale, covered in freckles, her neck flayed open, exposing tendons, bones. “Marco Merrick.” A photo of a boy whose amber skin has turned ashen, chunks of his body bitten clean through and off. “Gregor Mortis,” he says, another photo, sliding them around the cold coffee. “Deputy Joseph Dewey.”

Mama lets her eyes glaze over, forces herself past the horrible familiarity of their faces, the feeling of failure. She didn’t do even the _minimum_ of her fucking job, let Kepler wander straight into the lions maw.

“Boyd Mosche,” he says, and he’s yelling now, throwing a photo of a mean looking man she doesn’t know into her face. His blue-grey eyes are rolled into the back of his head, which hangs to an odd angle where he’s been crammed into a closet. “Edmund Chicane, do you recognize these people, Madeline?” he shouts. “Do you recognize Edmund? _His blood is all over your hands._  These are people that _died_ in your town, people who _you_ got killed!”

“I believe he preferred Ned,” Mama tells him weakly. “And his blood wouldn’t be anywhere on me anymore if y’all kind folks would let me use the bathroom and take a shower.” _Ned looks cold_ , she thinks, someone should really have put their jacket over him, fixed his hair. He wouldn’t want to be seen looking like that.

“You’re making _jokes_?” the agent asks, his upper lip curling, incredulous. “Are you _serious_? These people _died_ , and you did nothing to stop it, you might as well have just killed them yourself!”

Mama’s gut is rolling, and she has a sour taste in the back of her throat, a dry mouth that’s unrelated to how thirsty she is. Ned looks up at her from the table and she, like a coward, pushes him away.

The agent senses weakness like a shark smells blood in the water, hones in on it like a guided missile. “Marco was only _nineteen_ . He was a _baby_ , and _you_ got him killed. Whatever you are hiding, whatever you had squirreled away in whatever insane operation you had going, we _will_ find out. Your only chance to make this right is if you tell us what you know _first_.”

Mama doesn’t reply. She’s wondering when the Good Cop will come in.

The Bad Cop slams his hands down on the table, which is so cliche she wishes she could hit him for it. “Does death mean nothing to you?” he shouts. “These people died terrified! In agony!”

“From the looks of that photo, I believe Mr. Mosche’s neck was snapped,” she informs him politely. She doesn’t taste bile anymore, her stomach is calm, her heart is a void of space, hollow chested. Her skull feels empty, light, no emotions to be found. She is drifting outside of herself, clinging to the ceiling like a funnel weaver spider, making a gossamer web that looks like stretched fibers, preparing to be spun to yarn. “Not much agony in that.”

“What kind of fucking psychopath are you?” he snarls, rising, and either he’s a good actor or he actually feels like this, because she’s pretty sure he’s going to lay his hands on her. She can see the chain of events spiraling out from her spot on the ceiling tiles - him delivering a punch or a slap, her pinning his hand to the table and breaking all of the delicate bones in his fingers, the phalanx, the metacarpals, their silent audience of agents swarming in like locusts to stop it. “You don’t care about children dying, you don’t care about your friends being murdered, you don’t feel any sense of duty towards your government, and you feel _no_ shame for causing a _massacre!_ You have the easiest job in the fucking world right now, because all you have to do to help fix it is _talk,_ and you _won’t!_ You disg-,”

“Agent Dougan!” someone says from the door, and the man - Agent Dougan - stops. “That’s enough!”

The Good Cop is a woman, thin, blonde, pale as paper with huge green eyes. She’s in a light blouse and a pencil skirt, armorless, designed to be disarming. She pushes past Dougan, who goes to stand next to the mirror, and unlocks Mama’s cuffs, apologizing profusely. Mama thanks her, picks up the coffee and takes a sip that she doesn’t taste before chucking it directly at Dougan’s head.

He ducks, of course, she’s not exactly quick, and it makes all the joints in her arm pop, waking up and howling in pain, but it does splatter all over him.

Everybody in the room looks at her for a second, hands flickering to hover over their holstered guns, but she doesn’t move, stays sitting with her palms flat on the table.

Dougan’s face turns a very unflattering shade of puce, and he stalks out of the room without a word.

“Well, I suppose I can’t blame you for that,” Good Cop says. “I’m Special Agent McKerrow, but you can call me Sophia, if you’d like.”

“I wouldn’t,” Mama says, rubbing at her wrists. The blood streaks under her sweaty palms. She slowly stands up, which makes every joint in her body crack like gunshots and she staggers sideways, unbalanced on her numb legs. “I would, however, love to use the bathroom.”

“Of course,” McKerrow says. “And a shower, good god, I’m _so_ sorry you’ve been stuck here. I’ll lead the way.”

* * *

The water never gets hot, but it’s above freezing, so she’ll take it. It pools rusty brown on the white tile around her feet for a few minutes, and she has to scrub at her skin with her hands before it runs clear. They give her little hotel-like bottles of shampoo and conditioner, but no body wash, which is fine, shampoo is just fancy soap.

Mama’s body wakes up in painful increments, from numb to a deep, all over ache that gets worse the longer she stands, until she’s braced against the wall to stay upright, taking deep breaths through her teeth. She slowly forces her back straight, out of its petulant slouch. A wave of pops ripple through her thoracic spine, ending with a _click_ in her lumbar spine, right above her pelvis, painful enough to make her gasp and loud enough to make McKerrow, who is standing outside the stall with another female agent - Paquet, she’d said - rap politely on the wall.

“Everything alright?” McKerrow asks, sounding genuinely concerned.

“Yes,” Mama grunts. “Just old.”

Paquet starts to laugh, then smothers it, like she isn’t sure if that was meant to be a joke or not. They give her a fresh set of the same clothes once she steps out, and McKerrow leads her into a different room, this one smaller, both the chairs are bolted down, and the table lacks a ring for handcuffs. She supposes this is what passes for a _homey_ interrogation room. McKerrow slips into the chair with its back to the door, fiddles with a voice recorder for just a moment longer than she needs to, giving time for their observers in the mirror to settle in.

“Again, Madeline, so sorry about before -,”

“Miss Cobb,” Mama interrupts. “We ain’t friends.”

“Of course,” McKerrow replies. She smiles, soft and a little sad, and Mama wishes she hadn’t wasted her coffee throwing it at Dougan, because the good cop is always _so_ much worse. She’d forgotten that, somehow. “How are you feeling?”

“I’m a brown woman locked in a room at the FBI, bein’ denied my Miranda rights, havin’ just been shouted at by a large white man,” Mama tells her, flat. “Nobody knows where I am. How do you think I feel, Agent McKerrow?”

Agent McKerrow winces. “Again, I am so, so sorry about him. He’s… well, I won’t make excuses. He can be a bastard.”

“You’re not,” Mama replies.

“Excuse me?”

“You’re not sorry.” Anger rises in her chest, and she grits her teeth against it to keep from shouting. “You are _complicit_. If you truly disagreed with what was going on, you would have walked out and quit on the spot or freed me yourself, much earlier. _Before_ I was sittin’ in isolation for hours straight in chains.”

“I am honestly sorry about that,” McKerrow says, frowning, her forehead wrinkling. “We were just busy sorting things out, I promise things will be better from now on -,”

Mama talks over her, going in for the kill. Violence begets violence, as Dougan had seen, and she has _no_ patience for psychological warfare. “No, no, you aren’t sorry,” she says, putting her hands down flat with a bang. McKerrow doesn’t so much as blink. “This is a game you’re runnin’ on me, only I know the rules just as well as y’all do. You’re gonna put on your charm as a delicate white lady to try and make me feel at ease, establish a rapport, and then Agent Dougan is gonna come on in again and shout at me some more, with you in the background tellin’ me to _just give in, tell him what he wants and he’ll stop, please, I’m powerless, I can’t stop him_. Am I correct?”

McKerrow keeps her face soft, shakes her head no, but she has the general aura of someone who has just stepped in dog shit - disgust and irritation. She seems to be mulling her words over, not wrong footed, just thoughtfully annoyed, trying to figure out how to wrangle the conversational thread back into her favor.

“You’re worse than him, Agent!” Mama continues, not giving her a chance, gesticulating sharply to underscore her points, leaning in close. “You leave folks to sit and suffer and sweat in a room for hours, so they’ll be nice and tender when you let your buddy bad cop scare the shit out of them. And then you _sit there_ and worm your way into their hearts and heads, try to convince them you’re their _friend_ as you deprive them of their fuckin’ _rights_ , one little bit at a time, _destroy_ them from the inside out, and -,”

Mama’s chest seizes. She chokes.

“Miss Cobb?” McKerrow asks, alarmed, from very far away and right across the table and directly into her ears. Something screams.

Mama stands up, slams the backs of her knees into the bolted down chair. Her heart beats so hard and quick in her chest that it hurts. Her stomach flips, she gags, doubling over and swallowing down bile as she realizes her anger ran her directly into a fucking _panic attack_ , _Jesus fuck, Christ -_

McKerrow grabs her wrist, sharp fingers trying to find a pulse. She says something, urgent. Mama’s face and hands go numb. She sucks in a breath that does nothing but tangle and rattle in her throat, and another, and another, and another, useless. Her head is light and the lights are loud and the sound of the world is bright.

She twists her hand in McKerrow’s grasp to clutch at her forearm as other agents rush into the room. “Please,” she gasps out, “Please, I want to go home. I want to go home.”

Her face is wet. McKerrow looks stunned, and does not reply.

She wants - she wants Barclay, rubbing circles on her back, folding her into his arms, gentle, breathing with her through it, forehead to forehead and nose to nose. She wants to lie down in the sun, melt down to her bones. She wants to hear Thacker’s laugh, see his smile, his eyes focusing on her like she’s a friend and not prey, she wants her best friend back. She wants her mother to press a thumb to the furrow between her brows, kiss her forehead, say _don’t frown mijita, your face will stick like that. La vida continúa con o sin tus preocupaciones_. She wants Jake sitting nervous at the foot of her bed, giving her his worry stone, asking her if she’s feeling better. She wants Dani to talk her through mindfulness, lead her out of the spiral with a gentle hold on her fingers. She wants Aubrey doing sleight of hand tricks to cheer her up, she wants Dr. Bonkers in her arms, purring. She wants the Lodge, her bed, her workshop, her pencils, her tools, her polishes - her mother. She wants her mother.

She gets lead to a quiet, dark room, a plain blue mattress with a pillow but no sheets. McKerrow hands her a plastic bin when a sob catches her with such force that she retches, but nothing comes up. The door shuts with a click, throwing the room into blackness.

Mama covers her eyes with her hands, and screams.

* * *

The next morning, someone knocks on her door. She knows it’s morning because this room has a _window_. It’s chicken wire glass and covered by a sheet of metal full of perforations only a little bigger than a pen nib, but it’s a window all the same. Mama watched the shattered sun climb up the wall a while ago while eating a tray of rubbery eggs that’d been slid through a slot in the door, so she also knows she’s facing east. She’s thoroughly embarrassed by last night, having made a spectacle of herself in front of Agent Stern’s coworkers. It’s not _really_ her fault, she knows, being out of it for that long was bound to do her in at some point, and it all could have been prevented if they’d let her sleep _laying down,_ rather than sitting up.

She could have prevented it even further back, by running when she first heard sirens.

Anyway. She’s glad she didn’t do the very thing she’d called Stern an amateur for and thrown up. Pot, kettle, glass houses and the like. The spot at the back of her head where she’d broken his nose is sore.

The door, to her surprise, doesn’t open. There’s another knock.

Mama looks up into the camera in the corner and mouths, _can you believe this shit?_

“Come in,” she says, just to have some control over the inevitability.

The door swings open, and a young woman in a sweater with rolled up sleeves holding a clipboard walks in. It feels less designed than McKerrow - McKerrow was a razor blade hidden in a cotton ball - and this woman is soft all the way through. Her sweater is cable-knit, burnt orange, oversized, and she wears a pale blue button up beneath it, on top of leggings and white tennis shoes. She has emerald green cat-eye glasses hanging from the sweaters collar, her hair and eyes are dark.

“Good morning!” she says, smiling. Her voice is light, sweet, but not falsely so, and her accent is faint, but northern. Boston, maybe, or somewhere close. “I’m Dr. Ellie Ruskin, but you can just call me Ellie. I heard you had kind of a scary night last night.”

Mama, sitting on her bed, raises an eyebrow at her. “I can assure you that I’m in perfect health.”

She laughs. “Oh, no, I’m not that kind of doctor. I’m a psychologist. I couldn’t be a doctor, blood and that stuff…” She shudders. “I’m not good with it. If you’re feeling up to it, I’d love it if you’d come with me and get some coffee, find a more comfortable place to chat. If not, we can totally stay here! Up to you!”

Mama would, in fact, like some coffee.

Dr. Ruskin is much shorter than her and stubbornly ignoring the agents dogging their every step. She holds the clipboard in both hands and walks with her feet pointed out, occasionally rising up onto her toes when she’s making a point, which brings her up to about Mama’s chin, rather than her shoulder. She doesn't seem to mind that Mama’s not replying, happy to chat idly about things like her cat, Kitri, and the traffic in DC.

Mama’s ankle clicks loudly with every step she takes, making Dr. Ruskin look at her in concern, which Mama pays no mind. It hurts, but not nearly as badly as it sounds like it does. She can’t figure out what angle Dr. Ruskin is going for here.

She stands very precisely as she pours them both a cup of coffee, and it pings some familiarity in the back of Mama’s brain.

“I actually don’t really like coffee,” Dr. Ruskin tells her conspiratorially, dumping about 10 packets of sugar into her mug, “I’m a huge tea fan, but I don’t think anybody here drinks it. I’m new, so I gotta blend in, y’know? What do you want in yours? Do you take it black? You look like that kind of person.”

“Do you do ballet?” Mama asks. “Just some cream, thanks.”

Dr. Ruskin blinks in surprise. “Oh!” she says, “Yeah, I did! For about 17 years. Had to quit when I was 20, I tore my meniscus and it was stop or never walk again. How’d you know? Is it the walk? Sometimes I do the whole toe ball heel thing still, even though its been years.”

Mama shakes her head. “Naw, it’s the whole… thing that you do with your feet when you stand. I had a friend in college who was a dancer. Recognized it.”

“Oh, interesting!” Dr. Ruskin says, pushing back out the door and through a trio of agents who fall into step behind her, undeterred by her glare. “Fifth position, yeah, it’s pretty ingrained in us all. Where’d you go? What’d you major in?”

Mama raises an eyebrow at her, takes a sip of her too hot, too watery coffee. “Shouldn’t you have a file on that?”

Dr. Ruskin’s pale face turns faintly pink as they turn a corner and down a hall of offices. “You know how I said I was new?” she asks.

“I do,” Mama replies. They slip into an office with a window overlooking the bullpen that says _Dr. Hartmann_ on a bronze plaque. Dr. Ruskin has a few tersely polite words with the agents that try to come in after them that mostly boil down to _no you aren’t going to handcuff her_ and _no you also aren’t going to come in here with us, don’t even try, you can watch through the window._

“Well,” Dr. Ruskin says, sitting down in a chair across from a couch, which she gestures to for Mama to sit in. “I only _just_ got hired. Dr. Hartmann, UP’s old psychologist, was going to train me, but he died just a few days ago. Today is actually my first day, I wasn’t supposed to start until Friday to give me some time to prep, but they called me in at the crack of dawn this morning saying they’d had an incident and needed me to come in right away.” That explains the state of the office, at least. It’s half boxes, half empty space, and none of it is Dr. Ruskin beyond a purse and a duffle coat hanging on a hook.

“And I was the incident,” Mama replies, half asking, half echoing the unsaid.

“And you were the incident!” She confirms, talking a drink of her coffee, making a face, then setting the cup onto the table between them. She unlaces her shoes and toes them off, tucking her legs up underneath herself. Mama can feel the watching agents developing eye twitches.

“My file on you is like, a sentence,” Dr. Ruskin says with a little laugh. “I should be getting more in by the end of the day, but right now it’s…” She pulls a folder out from under the legal pad she has in the clipboard and puts on her glasses to read it. “Your name is Madeline Dinah Cobb, you were born on May 15th, 1954, you’re 64 years old, you live in Kepler, West Virginia, and you got here last night! Also, it has your uh, _list of crimes_ , but that’s basically just flavor text. Anything I’m missing?”

“I’m a Taurus,” Mama offers. According to Aubrey, that matters. She puts her cup on the table next to Dr. Ruskin’s.

Dr. Ruskin snorts. “Cool! I’m a Virgo, we’ll get right along. Also, do you want me to call you Madeline? Maddie? I gotta say, you don’t seem like a Maddie to me.”

Mama makes a face. “That’d be because I ain’t one. My friends call me Mama,” she says, and for a moment she wants to say _and you can too_ , she wants to lean into the friendliness Dr. Ruskin exudes, wants an ally. She has to debate it, weigh it - Dr. Ruskin is new, she has no real connection to anyone at UP, she doesn’t seem to be trying to play her in any type of way. She could be a confidant. Only, she works here. She works here, and she’s talking to Mama right now, and anything she tells her is going to go directly into the ear of whatever agent decides to take a crack at her next.

“You could call me Madeline,” Mama decides on.

“Madeline,” Dr. Ruskin says. “Alright. Again, feel free to call me Ellie, the ink’s barely dried on my degree, so hearing _Dr. Ruskin_ sounds _very_ weird.”

Mama isn’t going to do that. She’s just too tired to say so. She’s been tired since she woke up this morning and the morning before and the morning before that one, a feeling that spirals further back the longer she reflects, edging its way quietly into every available corner of her life. It’s hiding in the times she skipped breakfast because she just wasn’t hungry, buried in the days she spent with her body on autopilot, tucked inside her excuses out of social gatherings, the _I have a headaches_ and the _I would but I’m busys,_ the _I’m prepping for the abominations,_ the times she said _I’m gonna go work on a sculpture_ and then didn’t. She didn’t notice it until now that it’s too big to ignore, in the way that one can forget about the dust bunnies swept beneath the bed until they have to grab something out from under there. It aches deep in her bones, dragging her down into the couch.

She almost wants to ask if she could utilize their time together to take a nap on the worn out microfiber, the way she would in the Lodge. Only rather than Barclay putting her feet up in his lap and knitting, Dr Ruskin could do paperwork that she undoubtedly has, read Dr. Hartmann’s abandoned files, start moving into her new office. It’d be nice, she thinks, the soft intimacy within the act of coexisting, the comfort of sharing a space with another body that breathes and moves and thinks, just like you do.

The agents outside probably wouldn’t approve.

“So, what would you say… happened? Last night?” Dr. Ruskin asks. She balances her clipboard on her knees and takes out a pen, ready to write.

“I’m sorry they called you in,” Mama says, honestly, ripping herself free from her thoughts. “I had a panic attack. It happens.”

“Oh, okay, cool,” Dr. Ruskin replies, writing that down. “I thought so! When they called me they made it seem like you were on the verge of total mental collapse, but when I watched the footage it seemed… well, still awful, but certainly not so dire. Special Agent McKerrow apparently thought you were having a heart attack.”

Mama laughs. “Agent McKerrow _hoped_ I was havin’ a heart attack, you mean.”

“Oh, is she not nice?” Dr. Ruskin asks. “I only talked to her for a moment.”

“Did you not hear me? On the tape?”

“No, the audio was broken,” Dr. Ruskin tells her. “What were you saying to her?”

Mama sits back against the cushions, folding her arms. “Outta curiosity,” she says, “Would you mind tellin’ me when I got booked in here yesterday?” She can picture what Dr. Ruskin saw, herself getting in McKerrow's face, shouting, choking, flinching, wilting. The tense grip of their hands on each other’s wrists.

“It doesn’t say,” Dr. Ruskin says, frowning.

“Interesting,” Mama says, “How ‘bout when I was allowed to go to my cell?”

“It’s a room, not a cell,” Dr. Ruskin kindly corrects, which proves to Mama that she clearly has never been in any sort of mental hospital. “But the timestamp on the video was - ah, I think 11:40? Bit of a late night, huh?”

Now, Mama doesn’t know exactly what time it was, but it was _definitely_ later than that. “Alright,” she says, “Does it say what I was doing when I was arrested?”

“It doesn’t.” Dr. Ruskin is frowning now, looking over the list.

“Intriguing,” Mama says, flatly. “Does it say how long I waited before my first interview?”

“No,” Dr. Ruskin says again, “As I said, I don’t have a lot of information here -,”

“I don’t fully know either,” Mama tells her, and she has to bite down on the anger that’s rising or else it’ll turn into another fucking panic attack, and that’ll be the cherry on top of her shit sundae. “Because I was arrested while _pulling survivors out of the rubble of my destroyed town_ , brought to this place with _no explanation_ , have been told I am _not_ gonna get a lawyer, and there ain’t no one in my family who knows where I am.”

Dr. Ruskin looks alarmed now. “You were denied a lawyer?”

“I was _laughed at_ when I asked for one,” Mama says, “I sat waiting handcuffed to a table in the interrogation room covered in the _blood_ of one of my _friends_ who got _shot_ and _died_ in front of me, was denied a shower or a drink by Agent Kwasnik -,” She can feel Ned’s blood spraying up under her fingers again, and she has to scrub her hands on her pants to dislodge the feeling, “I _slept_ at the table like that, and then got physically intimidated by Agent Dougan so that Agent McKerrow could play good cop. Kepler is a good four hours from Quantico, which is where I can only _assume_ I am, seein’ as I ain’t even been told that. I was arrested at sundown, so about 5:30, and if we say processin’ me took an hour, and I waited a half-hour for Kwasnik to get to me, and I slept ‘bout three hours, by the time Dougan got in my face it was already 2AM. I had a panic attack at what I’ll call 3 in the morning, because if I think about it as any later it scares me.” Dr. Ruskin’s clipboard is sliding sideways off her knees, her hands tucked against her stomach like she doesn’t know what to do with them.

“The audio wasn’t _broken_ , Dr. Ruskin,” Mama tells her, “They wouldn’t let you hear it because I was rippin’ McKerrow a new asshole ‘bout the mind games they were playin’, and they ain’t sure about your morals yet.”

Dr. Ruskin’s clipboard wedges itself between the seat cushion and the arm of the chair, pen falling to the floor. She picks it back up with a little cough, taking off her glasses and cleaning them with the hem of her sweater.

“Could it be,” Mama says, gentle now, “That you don’t have all the information, not because it ain’t there, but because they didn’t want you to have it?”

It’s quiet for a few minutes. Mama watches the agents watching them.

“I don’t think you belong here, Ellie,” Mama tells her. “I don’t think you’re gonna fit in too well.”

Dr. Ruskin looks troubled. She fiddles with her glasses for a moment, clicking the arms together, then puts them back on and takes a deep breath. “We’ll see,” she says. “It’s only my first day. I’ll go talk to them about all this, I’m sure they have an explanation for how you’ve been treated.”

“I’m sure they will,” Mama replies, mild. “But will it be a good one?”

She watches Dr. Ruskin as she visibly pushes past what she’s just been told and shifts into therapy mode, looking down at her legal pad with her pen poised to write. “How would you say your emotional state was leading up to the panic attack?”

“I was pretty out of it,” Mama replies. “A little angry.”

“And how about now, after?”

“Fine,” she says.

“Do you often have panic attacks?” Dr. Ruskin asks, writing without looking up.

“I think we’re done here,” Mama tells her. “But, would you mind getting me something?”

“Depends on if they’ll let me,” Dr. Ruskin replies.

“I’m an artist,” Mama says. “I got an MFA in sculpture, that’s what I went to school for. I still like drawin’, though. If you could get me a pencil, some paper…” she trails off. “Well, it’d be awfully kind of you.” She waves at the agents outside, stands up and crosses towards the door. Dr. Ruskin makes no move to stop her.

* * *

 She spends some more time in an interrogation room after Dr. Ruskin gives them the all clear, she’s not about to have a psychotic break or something. They talk at her, sometimes shouting, sometimes cajoling, sometimes trying to accuse her of crimes she didn’t commit, but they don’t go for outright mind games again.

“If you tell me what happened to my guests at the Lodge,” Mama says, “I’ll tell you what you need to know.”

_I don’t have the clearance for that,_ one says, and then switches over to trying to guilt her. Mama doesn’t listen, staring straight ahead and unfocusing her eyes when they shove photographs in her face.

She’s not naïve. She knows her brain is a snarled mess of tripwires and quicksand and hairpin triggers, a bomb that ticks down to detonations that she has to try and shield the people she loves from - therapy would help fix that. She hates the knee-jerk emotion that rises like a scorpions tail to strike at every loud noise or unexpected movement - it makes her mean, angry, bitter, vindictive. She let it loose on McKerrow, the violent words like pleasure, rolling off her tongue sweet like honey, the splash of the cup against the mirror behind Dougan a completed electrical circuit, turning on a lightbulb of dopamine and serotonin. They’d deserved it, and she’d like to do it to every agent and backwards politician all the way up to the president and back down again, but sometimes it turns onto her loved ones, which does nothing but give her a stomach full of rat poison. It never used to be that way, but now, every two months for about a week, she turns into a jumpy motherfucker. Lately, that week has been stretching to a week and a half, two, two and a half, lingering even after the kill has been confirmed.

She can be a difficult person to be around, nowadays.

* * *

 When she gets lead back to her room, there’s a stack of plain printer paper and a single mechanical pencil sitting on her bed, which now has scratchy white sheets. The world that she can see when she presses her forehead to the window is dark.

Mama knows her sketches will be confiscated to be looked over for clues, so even though her hands and brain itch to draw her residents, a little taste of home to put into her pockets, she puts the lead to paper and makes the shape of something else. She’s great at sculpting kindness into wood - a figure lying underneath a shining tree, relaxed, the tranquility of a great elk in the forest crafted out of oak, but her college days were full of the macabre, bent limbs and gutted bellies. She doesn’t like that much anymore, now that she’s seen it with her own eyes. She prefers the gentle, the serene. But it still lies beneath the surface.

She sits on the floor and draws the bust of a woman with roots growing out of her eyes, down her face, dripping from her open mouth, a birch bursting out of her back like wings. At the right angle, she could have Dani’s nose. She draws a man hunched over, skeleton ripping and rising out of him like a crab from its shell. It’s been a while since she’s drawn like this, so they come out rough - strange proportions, unnecessary lines, and shadows in the wrong places. Dani would critique them, gently ribbing her about the width between the eyes, and Barclay would threaten to frame them, steal the pages and hide them in his dresser drawers. She draws a series of faces, random at first, cobbling together fictional people until she gets the hang of anatomy again. Then it’s Kwasnik’s uncanny valley GI-Joe smile, Dougan’s throbbing forehead vein as coffee drips down his cheek, McKerrow’s shocked, huge eyes, the alarmed twist to her brow, and the troubled slant to Dr. Ruskin’s mouth. They slide food under the door, which she eats methodically, automatically.

Barclay had been the one to teach her the joy in eating, when she’d met him. She’d liked eating well enough before the abominations started appearing, her mother had served something home cooked every night for dinner come hell or high water, she’d grown up with an appreciation of food and what it could do for you.

Something had clicked off on the night she had stared down her first abomination, in the quiet field outside her and Mike’s tent, a half mile behind an abandoned hotel, which would later become Amnesty Lodge. It was in the middle of a warm snap, and they’d both wanted to sleep under the stars. She was camping for the first and last time, stepped outside in the middle of the night to pee, gun in hand.

There was something sitting in a tree.

It was crouched on one of the middle branches, humanoid, grotesque. The bough creaked lowly under its weight. It had four limbs, all of them arms, the lower sets hands - the ones gripping the bark beneath it - were swollen to twice their normal size, whatever that would be, puffy to the point of bursting, skin going translucent with strain. The other set clutched a red fox, ripped in half, and it stuck one huge, clawed hand and the foxes upper body down its gullet as she watched. It was so, so tall, its stick-like body and skeletal arms - easily five feet long - gleamed sickly yellow in the moonlight, belly rounded with viscera. It pulled its hand and forearm out of its throat and flipped to look at her at eye level, upside-down. Its lower hands shrunk as it did so, its head distending with liquid and doubling in size, round, huge, balloon like. Lidless, pupiless eyes the size of grapefruits and a button nose scrunched up as it smiled at her, a toothless thing that wrapped around its whole face. White light poured out from its mouth, and a little piece of intestine, like a worm from a bird's beak.

She raised her rifle.

Mike yelped inside the tent.

“Well then!” A voice said from behind her, weirdly throaty and muffled, as though the speaker's mouth was full of gravel. “That was a lot easier than I was expecting this to be!”

She turned around. A man is standing next to the tent in a full suit of armor, taking off his helmet.

He’s a goat.

Mike poked his head out of the tent. “What the fuck did you just shoot at?” he asked, and then his eyes landed on the deflated body of the thing behind her, still gushing yellow liquid.

“Did I do any LSD tonight?” Mama asked him, and he twisted to see what she was looking at.

“No,” he replied.

“I’m Vincent,” the goat said.

“What the fuck?” Mama asked.

After that night, mealtimes mostly faded from her mind - she ate when her body told her to, or when she was troubleshooting its various complaints. If she eats will the migraine go away? If she eats will the mental fog clear? Are the tremors from not eating, or from her nerves? Does she need to take a bath to ease her sore muscles or will eating make the pain go away?

And then - Barclay. Suddenly she was eating to _enjoy_ again, not just to function. She was getting picky about flavors - there’d been a year long period that she shudders to think on, where she’d shove any combination of garbage into her stomach as long as it contained calories - ribbing him about seasoning, and sitting down to have a meal rather than standing at the counter.

She ended up gaining nearly twenty pounds, softening her hips, her thighs, the hard ridges of her abdomen. She didn’t notice until one day she realized that she felt _good,_ alive, awake for the first time in years. Also, her pants didn’t fit right anymore.

She’d wanted to tell Barclay immediately, but didn’t know how to broach the subject, so she just let it lie for weeks, resting on the tip of her tongue whenever she saw him baking, or teaching himself how to knit, or sitting in the sun, his hair hanging shaggy over his ears and forehead. At the time he kept it close cropped, but it’d been a while since he’d gotten it cut.

She’d come up behind him in the kitchen as he chopped vegetables, wrapped her arms around his waist, her chin on his shoulder.

_I’ve been feelin’ really good lately,_ she’d said. _I don’t think I’d be feelin’ like this without you, here, doin’ this._

_I can tell,_ he’d replied. _You look good. Better than before, anyways - not that you looked bad, just… You look good._

She’d pinched his side. _Thank you for cookin’,_ she said.

_The food is the biggest part of the home,_ he said, pushing her off and turning around to press a kiss to her forehead. _You told me that, Mama._

She wonders where he is now, if he’s eating, if he’s feeding the rest of the Sylphs, if they’re safe, if Dani’s recovering, if she’s feeling guilty over what happened to - what happened. Mama hopes she’s with Aubrey, that they haven’t blamed each other, that they’re safe.

She’s drawn that first abomination, sitting like a gargoyle in that tree. She considers, for a second, eating the paper so the agents don’t get at it, but it’s not really a clue of any sort, nothing they could glean information from. The thing is also long-dead, a popped water balloon full of acid. The tree had withered shortly thereafter - whatever fluid that had leaked out of it stripped the ground bare, and for years nothing took root. There’s lily of the valley there now, little white bells of poison blooming in the toxic earth.

She gives the terrible creature a party hat that says _birthday boy_ and goes to bed. Figure _that_ one out, agents.

* * *

She gets talked to again the next day by Dougan, who tries a much calmer, more tactful approach. She stares at the wall again, tunes him out. Kwasnik joins him, then an agent she’s never seen before. _What happened to my residents?_ she asks. _Just tell me that much._ They don’t reply. She’s allowed to shower, but once she steps into the stall all she can see is blood, swirling down the drain, so she makes it quick, eyes shut, playing the 5-4-3-2-1 grounding game with herself.

When she gets back to her cell, all her drawings are gone, and there’s a new stack of printer paper. She knew it was coming, knew that there’d be nothing she’d be allowed to keep, but it hurts.

When she goes to draw, all that comes out is Ned. In profile, standing at the check-in desk at the Lodge, grinning at his own joke and leaning in close to Barclay, who she keeps an undefined collection of abstract shapes. His brow furrowed in concentration as he looked over a map, his hands wrapped around his stupid magic gun, his mouth frozen mid laugh, his shocked expression when the gate appeared, pressed into the front bumper of his Lincoln. A small portrait of his smile, that she folds meticulously and slides into the body of the mechanical pencil, hoping to keep it. Her neck and back hurt from the way she’s bent, but she keeps going - a sketch of him at his desk in the Cryptonomica, half asleep, his peacocking grin on _Saturday Night Dead_.

His face gone distant and quiet, hair awry against the snow covered ground, a droplet of blood under his eye, like a mole, or a freckle. She draws that over and over, in different angles and styles, trying to comprehend it. She draws the run up, his body in motion towards the incomprehensible unidentifiable blur of Dani, arms outstretched. A burst of blood and down. The moment before the silence of his heart, the reflection of the galaxy in his eyes, lips parted in wonder.

Tears drip off of the end of her nose, slide down her chin and neck. She draws it again, and again, and again. She hopes she manages to get out of here in time for the funeral.

* * *

She wakes up with _La Vie En Rose_ stuck in her head - not in the voice of any singer she’s heard, but in Barclay’s off tune baritone French, filling in words he doesn’t remember and the brief musical interludes with whistling. He’d favored a much more upbeat, poppy version than the original, a sweet, peppy little tune. She eats her breakfast, misses his cooking, and feels a little bit properly stir-crazy - too much so to have emotions other than _wired._ She can’t remember the last time she’d gone more than a day without being outside, at least sitting on the porch of Amnesty Lodge if the weather was bad, listening to the rain on the roof and off the leaves of the plants, watching the lightning or the snow falling or the trees quaking in the wind.

The lack of fresh air makes her want to climb the grey cinderblock walls.

She goes to draw, finds no inspiration. She lays on the little terrible twin sized bed that’s too short for her and is definitely giving her back problems and stares at the ceiling, starts singing along with Barclay’s semi-competent and not very confident warbling with her eyes shut, louder until she can almost hear his voice too, backing her up.

The door opens. She stands up, ready to be lead to whatever interrogation room they’ll be bullying her in today, and stops.

Agent Stern gives her a sheepish little wave, shutting the door behind him. His nose is taped straight, and he has two black eyes, red and purple and brown in a starburst across his face. She puts her hands on her hips. He looks _supremely_ embarrassed.

“I didn’t know you could speak French,” he tells her, nasal. “C'est pratique, personne ici ne le parle. Merdasse... Je pense que j'ai vraiment foutu la merde.”

“... I don’t,” she replies. “It’s Barclay’s favorite song. He listened to it and nothin’ else for a month straight at one point, I just memorized it.”

Stern sighs, a frustrated twist to his mouth. “Most people just know the English version. You should look into learning it, your accent isn’t terrible. Mind if I sit down?”

“Oh, sure, pull up a chair,” she says, not moving. “Nice shiners y’got there.”

His fingertips graze over his nose. “I got hit in the face by a woman I was pulling out of a car,” he says, making deliberate, uncomfortable eye contact. “It was an accident. I’m not mad about it.”

“I’d think an FBI agent would be trained to be more quick on the draw to avoid facial trauma,” she says, raising an eyebrow. “Maybe you should’ve been more prepared.”

“I was mid panic attack at the time, if I remember correctly,” he says mildly, not blinking. His back is to the camera. “I made some pretty poor choices during it, but to be fair, I’d just seen a man get shot, and then a _mountain_ -,” he shakes his head. “I’d send her a card to let her know I’m sorry for scaring her and that no harm was done, but I didn’t catch her name.”

_I’m sorry,_ he mouths at her, followed by what she thinks is _I fucked up._

She exhales. “Yeah, we’ve all made some bad decisions,” she tells him, sitting on the bed and patting the space next to her. “Some are bigger than others. Some are hard to correct, and you’ll be regrettin’ ‘em for the rest of your life.”

He sits down next to her, lightly, like he’s prepared to run, and the way he sits blocks her, his face, and the front of his body from the camera’s view.

“I’ve heard you’ve been frustrating my coworkers,” Stern says. He’s trying to look relaxed, and from his body language she’d say he’s succeeding, apart from his eyes. They’re locked in on her with the same intensity that she’s felt when she’s drawn the short straw to be bait for the abominations. _Like a gun dog on point,_  as Barclay would say. Waiting for the signal.

“Is that why they sent you in?” she asks. “They think we’re friends, and I’ll just chat with you?”

“They think we already have a rapport of sorts, so yes.” He taps his skinny fingers on his legs, notices he’s doing it, and stops. “I don’t think either of us would consider the other a _friend,_ however.”

“I don’t make a habit of gettin’ in cahoots with police of any sorts, no,” Mama says, and Stern snorts, then winces.

“Damn, that mystery woman got you good, huh?” she asks, leaning in close to inspect the bruising. Most of the swelling is gone, but in some places around his eyes the skin is still shiny and tight. “Hell of an arm on her.”

“Yes,” Stern says, glaring at her. “Hell of an arm.”

Mama laughs. She knows that she should be much more in control right now, given that he’s covering her ass from those extra charges and what with all the doubletalk they’ve been doing, but _Christ._ She cackles harder when she sees him biting his lip, trying to keep it together, and soon after his face cracks and he’s laughing too.

“I’m sorry,” Stern tells her when they’ve both quieted, “I don’t normally do interrogation type things. I’m quite bad at it, and I don’t love doing it, but I’d like to ask a few questions before I write my reports.”

“More of a point ‘n shoot guy, are ya?” Mama asks. She doesn’t think this conversation is an interrogation at all, but she can’t quite see the true shape of it yet.

He purses his lips. “No, not really. I don’t particularly... like that aspect of my job,” he says. “I leave that to my coworkers.”

“So what part of it _do_ you like?” she asks. _“Don’t_ say your coworkers, I’ve seen more joyful folks waitin’ to see a divorce lawyer.”

Stern chokes on a laugh. “They can hear you, you know.” He jerks his chin at the camera.

“Neat,” she says. She’d figured. “Hope they’ve been enjoyin’ listenin’ to me piss.” Stern chuckles again, and she continues, “I think Agent Dougan knows I’d like to throw more than some coffee at his head, but does Kwasnik know that he - actually, wait. Is Kwasnik married?”

“No, no girlfriend either.”

“Yeah, didn’t think so. Tell him if he spent less time playin’ the five knuckle shuffle into the American flag -,” Stern slaps the bed, putting a hand over his mouth to muffle his laughter. “-And more in learnin’ how to pleasure a woman he’d have a girlfriend by now. Does he always talk like a propaganda poster? He looks like a Ken doll who went to boot camp. He’s a walkin’ stereotype. It’s _sad.”_

Stern runs his hands through his hair, rubs his forehead. “He can be a little overzealous about our country, sure.”

“Overzealous, sure. I’m serious, Stern, you better tell him I said that.”

“I will, I will,” Stern says, raising his hands in a placating gesture.

“So, what do you like about your job?” she asks.

“I believe I’m the one supposed to be interviewing _you,”_ Stern says. All the humor seems to go out of him at once, his face rotating through emotions - sadness, anxiety, frustration - and settling on blank.

“Don’t avoid the question,” Mama says, “Or do you not like any of it? If you hate your job, you should quit.”

Stern is quiet for a moment. “I would have told you a few months ago that I enjoyed the investigation aspect of it,” he says. “I’ve always found puzzling things out interesting. Worthwhile. I was reading Nancy Drew books almost from the moment I learned to read. I’d try and figure out the mystery before she did.”

“Why the change?”

“Well,” Stern says. He clasps his hands together in his lap, huffs out an exhale. “It appears that I am _not very good at it.”_ He enunciates very precisely, in the way one does when they are trying not to sound upset. “I mean, you hid - and by that I mean you and Barclay, although I believe I am correct in my assumption that you were the mastermind. You hid -,” He trails off, exhales, licks his lips. “We aren’t even sure the _extent_ of what you hid, only that it was big. I mean, your basement, the _mountain_ -,” He makes like he’s going to stand up and pace, then remembers himself. “This is a failure on my part. A _complete_ failure, because you had exactly what I was looking for in the Lodge the entire time. The place where I _slept, every night,_ the place I used as my home base was compromised, and I _did not notice it._ That isn’t a _mistake._ It is a catastrophe, it is _cataclysmic,_ and I am solely to blame for it. I am my departments - no, the _FBI’s_ shame.”

Mama rubs the back of her neck.

“You said I should quit,” he says. “My own absolute _incompetence_ is going to get me fired. I don’t think I have any right to quit. I am a _sham_ of an agent and a _complete_ idiot.”

“I don’t think you’re stupid, Agent Stern,” Mama says. She understands the shape of it now, like how she can look at a block of wood and know what needs to come out of it. She can already feel the weight of the words in her throat, like her file in her hands, breaking free the details.

“What would you call my utter _lack_ of cognitive ability then?” he demands.

It’s a reflex, going to take one of his hands, as though he’s Jake, or Dani, or Aubrey. He looks at her, startled.

“You’re not stupid,” she tells him, gentle. “You just ran into someone who was more prepared for you than you were for them.”

He blinks at her, brow furrowing ever so slightly.

“There comes a time where _everybody,_ no matter who you are or how _smart_ you are, runs into someone smarter than you are. It has happened to me _many_ times, it will happen to me again, it has happened to your parents, it has happened to their parents, it’s happened to the foxes in the forest and the sharks in the seas, and it’s happened to you before. It’ll happen to you again. It don’t mean that you’re _stupid,_ it means you are a livin’ being.” She gives his hand a squeeze, grateful that his torso is blocking it from the camera. He looks down at it like it’s an alien lifeform. “I had more of the puzzle pieces than you did this time around, that’s all. I played my cards better and I acted better and there was no way you could have known, ‘cause I’ve, frankly, just done a few more loops around the sun than you. It doesn’t make you an idiot. It makes me _prepared_.”

Stern exhales slowly, chewing at the inside of his cheek.

Mama leans in a little towards his ear. “If it makes you feel any better, Stern,” she breathes, “Whatever that thing was, in Kepler? I think that was a little bit smarter than us all.”

Stern withdraws his hand.

“Christ,” he whispers. He goes to rub at his eyes and then quickly drops his hands, remembering. “No wonder they call you mama, huh?”

“Yep,” she says. “Been adopting folks since I was a little kid. Would scoop ‘em up off the sidewalk and bring ‘em on home for dinner, much to my mom’s chagrin.”

Stern looks interested at that, and not in the laser focus of before, simple curiosity. “What was your mother like?” he asks.

Mama smiles. “A battleaxe.”

“Oh, so you’re a lot alike then?” Stern asks. 

“Flattery won’t get ya anywhere with me,” she tells him. “But yes.”

“I’m well aware,” he says, smiling slightly. 

Stern has to leave shortly thereafter - the FBI doesn’t want to pay him for more overtime, apparently he’s been working nearly nonstop - but Mama finds that her brain is stuck on her mother.

“What happened to the guests at Amnesty Lodge?” she asks the moment Agent Paquet walks into the interrogation room she’s been lead to. “I’ll tell y’all whatever you want, just give me that.”

“I don’t have -,”

“The clearance,” Mama finishes. She rolls her eyes.

She’d never known her father - the name a blank line on her birth certificate, although there wasn’t any sort of hole in her life, her mother filling in that space and then some. She’d never asked either, it’d seemed inappropriate somehow. _Hey Ma, was my dad a friend? A stranger? A sperm donor? Did something happen to you? Was I an accident?_ She’d end up never knowing who gave her her height, her eyes, the span of her shoulders, her mother would carry it into her grave. Although earlier than anticipated, her death had always a possibility, like a storm on the horizon, ignored until lightning strikes the ground.

She’d had a heart attack in her sleep, painless, sudden. Her mother would never let something so small as death cause her discomfort.

She’d been seven when she’d gotten into her first fight - a boy had grabbed another girl on the playground, she’d yelled, said _no, stop,_ and he hadn’t listened, and suddenly it transformed from a half joking wrestling match to something more, something serious. Mama, reed thin, 3’10, had felt a sudden cold, serene calm wash over her, walked over, and promptly busted her knuckles on the back of his head, and then his nose, and then whatever part of him she could reach. His friends had _not_ liked that.

Her mother had shown up still in her scrubs.

_We’ve been understaffed at the hospital all day,_ she said to the principal, looking down at him. _I’d just finished drainin’ a pocket of puss at the back of a mans throat when I got the call, so this **better** be good. _

After the explanation, a fifteen minute shouting match with the boys mother and the principal, and stealing a cold pack from the nurse, her mother took her out for ice cream, covered her unbruised hand with both of her own. _Are you sure you wanna choose this path, mijita?_ She’d asked.

Mama didn’t reply, because she was seven and didn’t know what that meant.

Her mother sighed. _What am I sayin’, you’re my daughter,_ she’d said, and signed Mama up for a martial arts class the next day.

Battleaxes, yes, the both of them, digging their heels in and butting heads at every opportunity, every fight a knock down drag out affair. It’d been a fierce sort of love, one with fangs and an iron grip, but it was never _mean,_ and she’d never resented it. Her mother always gave her pieces of advice when she’d walk out the door - _don’t talk to cops sweetheart, if you get in trouble call me and I’ll take care of it, if you kill someone call me and I’ll take care of it, don’t ever let a man touch you in a way you don’t want, you should be carrying your knife._

She also loves like her mother did, protective, running a tight ship at the Lodge with no patience for nonsense, sitting with every crying guest, patching up every wound, every heartache, running off everybody who looked at one of them funny. A kiss on the forehead and an _I’m so proud of you,_ followed by a call to stand up straighter, make smarter choices, _I know you can do better than that._

When she gets released back into her room, she pulls the pencil apart. Ned’s still there, creased but smiling, so she does the same to her mother, over and over, her look of deadly rage, her face when she laughed, her hanging her scrubs out to dry on the clothesline, her hands around a chef's knife, her sleeping form on the couch after a shift at the ER. A tiny portrait of her grinning, folded tiny, jammed into the mechanics of the pencil.

* * *

Stern shows up at the same time the next morning, knocking, entering. He looks rattled, ill at ease as he assumes the same spot on the bed as last time, back to the camera. He unbuttons and adjusts his suit jacket as he sits, hand flicking into an inside pocket and out.

“Did you sleep well?” he asks. He has the same look as when he was trying to tell her something with different words the day before, so she does her best to pay attention. Christ, she’s bad at double talking though.

“I’m too tall for the bed,” she says. “So, not particularly.”

He has a piece of folded paper clenched between his index and middle finger, which he’s opening with one hand. “Nothing to be done about that, I suppose,” he says, “My apologies.”

He shows her the paper against his belly. It’s a sticky note, lavender purple. _I need 2 make a decision. How do u be a good person? How do you know u r doing the right thing?_ It asks in Stern’s fine print. _Blink 2x before u give ur answer._

She nods carefully. “No, nothing to be done. Good to see you haven’t been fired, though.”

Stern chuckles, but it rings false. “No, not yet. But I can feel it coming down the pike. You’re an artist, correct? A very successful one? What did you do before you became famous? You had to pay the bills somehow.”

“Retail,” she says. “It’s why y’all can’t intimidate me. Cut my eyeteeth standing my ground in food service and let me tell _you,_ the general public is _much_ scarier than FBI agents who think their guns ‘n badges give ‘em a bigger dick than me. Also, gettin’ arrested at protests and doin’ acid, but then again, who wasn’t? The 70’s and 80’s were a time.”

Stern does actually laugh at that one. “What sorts of protests?”

“Oh, all kinds,” she says, waving a hand. “My first was an anti-war rally in 1970. Not Kent state, but 'bout the same thing.”

He squints at her. “How old were you then?”

She can see the scene unfolding in front of her, the air hot and dry in her lungs and her friend’s older brother’s van, idling on the side of the road. _How old are you?_ he asked. She’d been so angry, watching her mother pace and shout about the draft and useless wars, her knuckles going pale on the phones receiver, her legs tangling in the cord. She’d known what the protest was about at the time, but not how far back they’d went, how deep the problems were.

“Sixteen in twelve days,” she replies, in time with her remembered teenage self. Her friend’s brother had thought for a long moment, then said, _if shit goes sideways keep your head down and stick close._

Stern’s eyebrows climb his forehead. “Young, huh?”

She shrugs. “Maybe. Maybe not. The last one I went to was in 1987, ‘bout the AIDS crisis. Got arrested at that one with a few friends. We took off after that. Wound up in Kepler. And then I…” she shrugs. “I got kind of sucked in. Hard to leave the Lodge for too long. And I... didn’t really want to anymore. Had other things to deal with there, and the world never really _stops,_ but sometimes…”

“Sometimes what?” Stern asks anxiously, when she lets the pause drag out for too long, staring down at the floor.

“Sometimes you get tired, Stern,” she says. “Sometimes the constant battle gets to you. Sometimes you just wanna lie in the sun for a little while.”

“...Yes,” he says. He fidgets with the paper in his hand. “I think I can understand that impulse.”

“But you always get back up,” Mama tells him. “That’s how I live my life. Always gettin’ back up.”

The room is quiet for a minute.

“Why are you askin’ me ‘bout all this?” she asks. Stern sighs, runs the hand not holding the paper through his hair. His bruising is already starting to move towards sickly brown and green at the edges. Mama thinks she should, perhaps, feel guilty about it, but given the way her life is going right now she doesn’t. Maybe in the future. He had a nice nose - long and aquiline, giving him a sharp profile. Hopefully the doctors he went to put it back together right. “Aren’t you supposed to be interrogatin’ me about my -,” she air quotes, “-crimes?”

“I think you can learn a good deal about a person's current and future actions by examining their past,” Stern says. “It’s important to look over history to know what went wrong and where, so you can prevent the same from happening in the future. If I don’t know who you were, how can I know who you are?”

“You’re a very thoughtful person, ain't'cha,” Mama says.

“I’d like to think so,” Stern replies.

“Live a lot of your life in your head, right? Always mullin’ things over?”

“That’s been said, yes.” He gives her a little gesture, like _get on with it._ She wants to tell him that patience is a virtue, and she’s getting there, damn it, but there’s no real way for her to do it, so she settles for pausing for a few seconds.

“Would you say your fellow UP agents are like you?”

His brow furrows. “What do you mean?”

“You said it yourself yesterday, you’re not a _point and shoot_ kind of guy. You leave that for your coworkers. Do they think like you do?”

“They’re fine people,” he says, “And we get along well  -,”

“Do they _think?”_ Mama presses.

“We disagree on certain issues but there is no workplace animosity or whatever you’d like there to be -,”

“Simple question Stern, _do they think?”_

Stern shakes his head. “Different people have different roles to play, and without all the cogs the machine wouldn’t work. I have my part to play as much as they do. I respect them -,”

“Do they respect _you?”_ she asks, interrupting again. He looks incredibly frustrated. _What are you saying?_ he mouths.

“You’re a thinker, Stern. That’s _good_. The world needs people who _think_ and _mull_ and _work_ at an issue ‘til it gets fixed. But eventually you gotta break out of your own head.”

Stern exhales, visibly trying to think of a question that will round them back to his post-it. “Do you consider yourself a thinker?”

“Sometimes,” she replies, “I’m an artist, we’re very good at that. But I know when to quit.”

“Amnesty Lodge,” Stern says. “Buying that - was that you, ah, breaking out of your own head? Do you think you did the right thing there, even with _everything_ that happened since?” He looks pleased.

“Yeah, it was, and yes. I do.” She does the blink at him as she talks, even though she knows he’s got it. She wants to drive it home. “Sometimes, you need to just _act_ , and quit sittin’ and waitin’ and second guessin’, else nothin’ will ever get done. You _know_ when you do the wrong thing,” Mama says. “You’ll always know, you’ll feel it in the pit of your stomach, either right then or later on, but you’ll feel it.”

“So you believe you’re a good person, then?” he asks. His fingers clench around the post-it. “Even though - I mean, your town, Kepler, the place that- that was your spot to lie in the sun, as you said. Well, a mountain fell on it. People died - people were _murdered._ I’m certain that there are people out there who would say that that’s your fault.”

“It ain’t my fault,” she says, even though she doesn’t fully believe it, “I made the best choices with the information I had at the time, and there was somethin’ else out there that pulled my strings. It pulled your strings too. Whatever killed those people, whatever lifted the mountain, that’s on it, not me.”

“So you _do_ believe you’re a good person?”

“There is no _being_ a good person,” Mama tells him. “No one is intrinsically, from birth, good or evil. We are a collection of choices and actions, that lend us either way. There is no _being,_ Agent Stern,only _becoming.”_

He sits back, ever so slightly. She gets the feeling he’s not quite pleased with her answer, but she’s not sure what he’s looking for from her.

“Remember what I told you when we first met, Agent?” she tries.

_“The cryptid gig ain’t really my area,”_ he says, mocking, bratty, in a truly horrible approximation of her accent. She reflexively smacks him on the arm. _“You should -_ ow! _\- try down at the Cryptonomica.”_

“Ass,” she says, ignoring the pang in her chest. “Do you remember?”

“I do,” he says.

She remembers, sitting across the table from him, purposely bumping his legs with her cast, zippy little insults, the buzz of Barclay’s anxious, watchful eyes in the back of her head. Her body _hurt,_ she should have stayed in the hospital longer, but she’d had more pressing issues. She was just rude enough to be suspicious, modulating her expressions, making a tentative enemy, lying her ass off. Throwing herself onto a hand grenade to protect her residents, not for the first time.

And then. _There are no monsters in Kepler, Agent Stern. There never have been._

Well, there were ones every other month, but those - those weren’t what he was looking for.

“I was tellin’ the truth,” she says. She puts her hand on his again, just for a second. Stern frowns at her.

“Well, I think this was very enlightening,” he says, standing up. He swipes his hands down his slacks, brushing them off and slipping the little piece of paper into his pocket. “Thank you for your time, Madeline.”

“When you quit,” she says, “You should go ahead and start callin’ me Mama.”

“We’ll see,” he says. “I think I have to go _live in my head_ a little longer.”

She doesn’t see Agent Stern again after that.

* * *

Nor does she see Dr. Ruskin - after a nightmare induced second panic attack turns into a terrible spiral down memory lane that leaves her hyperventilating for hours, she winds up back in Dr. Hartmann’s office, staring down a man who’s perhaps Duck’s age, skinny, balding, pasty.

“Where’s Dr. Ruskin?” she asks.

“She quit,” he replies, serene. “I transferred in from the behavioral analysis department until they find someone who will fit.”

She doesn’t reply. He blathers on, picking out what he thinks she finds as flaws in her appearance, throwing out wildly inaccurate guesses on her mental processes, her self esteem, her relationships. She likes how she looks, she’s proud of her body, she knows how her brain works for the most part, she’s rather confident in her place in the world, and she has _many_ healthy relationships, thank you very much. At some point, he says, “Your closed off body language and lack of responses make me think that you’re a very guarded person. Would you say that’s accurate?”

She laughs at him so hard that she cries. _Behavioral analysis._ What a fucking joke.

(She can practically feel the dog out of her nightmare-memory, circling closer with its terrible, loping gait, stumbling along bipedal on two backwards legs, knees bending the wrong way, undeterred by bullets and fences and doors and fire. After it saw you, it _wanted_ you, a persistence hunter, a battle of endurance, only it _never got tired._ Two-headed coywolf, sinewy muscles stretched under a rotting pelt, foaming at the mouths, its white eyes ever rolling in their sockets, teeth that went all the way down its twin throats. Its call was loud human cackling - _ahaha, ahahAHAHA, AHAHAHA!_ She had to hit it with her truck, run over it and over it and over it until it stopped moving, stopped _laughing._ She’d chopped it to pieces, burned them, and when her collection of charred parts just wouldn’t quit _twitching,_ she’d bought concrete mix and encased them all, buried them in the woods, miles apart.)

(Maybe they’ll twitch themselves back together someday, and she’ll feel the bite of those thousands of teeth in her Achilles.)

* * *

She stops drawing about two weeks after Stern’s last visit. One evening she goes to sketch something, anything, the room she’s in, the interrogator’s face, her bedroom at the Lodge, and finds herself staring down at the empty sheet of paper. She feels blank again, like she did when she first arrived, gutted, cleaned out.

She can visualize pieces just fine though, and she spends hours at a time doing that, lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling or the wall. Self portrait, her face left rough and undefined, skeleton coming down from her neck, ribcage a vacant cavern - no lungs, no esophagus, no liver or spleen. No heart. Hollow spaces. She thinks about it on display - she’d light it from below, spotlight through the calcium arches, playing shadows off the wall. _Oak_ , she thinks. She’d carve it out of oak, sturdy, dependable.

Maybe she’d spend hours on her organs, making them slot together just right, like putting eggs in a carton, and take them all out again, leave them on pedestals around the room in the dark. _This is the construction of a person,_ she’d say, _this is the disassembly of a body. This is how it feels to be tired, to be truly, terribly, awfully tired._

Exhaustion creeps back in by degrees. They go back to mind games. An agent calls her stupid, asks if she ever expected her plans to work, tells her how easy it was to follow her trail. She asks about her residents - _I don’t have the clearance to tell you that_ \- and then she stops replying, there’s simply nothing to say. She starts doing math, tallying up abominations one by one. 180 of them, give or take. Too many to remember them all.

The next day an agent tells her she’s just _so_ smart, they have to learn from her, _please_ tell him everything, he’s so in awe. _Where are my guests?_ She asks him. _Tell me what happened to my guests at the Lodge?_ He tells her to ask someone else. She puts her head down on the table. If she really was so smart, she wouldn't be here. She would have run.

She could carve her woman, roots pouring from her mouth, from her eyes, the death of a dryad.

She plants a tree for every wood carving she does - black pine, siberian larch, maple, northern catalpa - giving back to the forest what her art takes. She fertilizes meticulously, protects the young trunks from beavers and porcupines, takes pictures and measurements to track growth until she’s sure they’ll be fine on their own, checks for diseases occasionally. She knows it's overkill, but it’s soothing, rewarding, pressing her hands to the bark and knowing that it’s thriving because of her, comparing images year by year to see their progress. The days she goes to check on her trees are quiet, calm, trekking around her property and down the mountain with a walking stick and a canteen, observing nature in action. It keeps her from forgetting exactly what it is that she’s protecting - when she sees the sun come up over the hills she remembers, when she sees a doe pause from ripping up grass to look up and stare at her she remembers, when she sees rabbits bolt across fields she remembers, when she hears the calls of the nightjars, the whip-poor-wills, the cardinals, the loons, when she sees mallards and hooded mergansers slip beneath the water in the lakes, she remembers. This is what she must keep safe.

She sees it in the faces of her residents, when they’re relaxed and happy, she saw it on the day that Dani smiled at her for the first time, when Jake’s shoulders came down from around his ears and he quit apologizing after every sentence, when Moira came out of the hot spring for the first time, laughed, said _I forgot how it feels not to always be hungry._ She remembers, she refuses to forget who she’s doing it all for.

She hopes that someone uncovers the gardens at the Lodge when it gets warmer, she’d hate for all of Dani’s hard work to wither and die. She doesn’t want her residents to have to start over again. The constant rebooting of a life is draining, and a lack of stability can kill.

She blinks awake in one interrogation, asks what day it is. It’s been a month since she arrived.

Shortly thereafter, the interrogations slow to a trickle, then almost stop completely.

* * *

And then one morning they wake her up at the crack of dawn with no breakfast and a pair of handcuffs. She gets brought down in the service elevator to a garage - it's raining today, the asphalt is wet and it smells like rain and gasoline, real, not recirculated air breaking the smothering empty that's settled deep onto her bones. Mama pauses to smell the air and one of the agents digs his shoulder into her back, pushes her forward. He's frustrated with her limp and not bothering to try to hide it, but it's not something she can _change._ It's _raining,_ she's damn well going to have to hobble. She gets bustled back into a black SUV, lights in the grill and thick treads.

"Where are y'all bringin' me?" she asks, skin prickling all the way up and down her spine. The driver - the agent who shoved her - shuts the partition in response.

She grits her teeth. The agents talk as they pull out of the garage, and Mama watches the world slip by, first in sepia and greyscale; tawny buildings and charcoal concrete, lit up with  the occasional neon sign and flashing billboard, then greener, greener, green. Blurry and muddled with rain but green nonetheless. She watches it, rapt. She thinks she knows where they're off to.

_Welcome to West Virginia - Wild and Wonderful,_ the sign reads, and Mama imagines that she could probably break her handcuffs with sheer force of will.

"Hey," she snaps, banging her elbow into the partition to get their attention. "Am I gettin' released?" There's no response, so she does it again. "Hey!"

The other agent - a thin, lanky man in his early 30's with pale skin and a nose that seems too small for his face, slides it open. "Do that again," he says, voice cold and quiet, "And I will break your arm."

There's a high pitched whine that she notices as he speaks - because it stops, suddenly, and there's silence. She can't hear the windshield wipers or the hum of the radio or the rumble of the tires. She doesn't sit back; although she tries, not wanting him to think she's challenging him. She doesn't move at all.

He nods at her after a few charged seconds of eye contact and noiselessly slides the window shut.

When she comes back to herself again, there's grass under her feet. She's being walked up to a building she doesn't recognize in a forest that she _does._ They're outside the archway. It's not raining here, but the sky is grey and heavy like it's waiting for it, skimming along the tops of the pines. Mama twists to look over her shoulder to where the lodge would be - not that she can see it through the trees, they're too far away - and sees someone on an ATV heading back through the woods towards it. There's floodlights and a barbed wire fence and armed guards. _Useless,_ she thinks, distantly. When the abomination comes through, it'll be a slaughter.

The inside of the building is busier than she thought it'd be, people murmuring about _fluctuating radiation_ and _interesting readings form this end, look here, see? Could this have practical applications for cloaking?_  She gets brought back to a room, handcuffed to a table for the first time in a while. The ringing is back in her ears. They make her wait.

Hours later a man walks in, one she’s never seen before. He’s tall, plain in the same way Stern is. Bland, conventional, built for function rather than form, like brutalist architecture. He’s holding a cup of coffee and a briefcase. His movements are calculated, everything with a purpose. He stands too still.

She feels goosebumps crawling up her arms, fear like ice breaking through the humming numbness that’s consumed her body, wrapping cold fingers around her heart. She doesn’t move.

“Miss Cobb? Brought you a coffee. Agent Stern tipped me off - cream, no sugar, right?” he asks, sitting down across from her, sliding it across the table. She doesn’t take her eyes off of him, keeps her mouth shut. “Right,” he says with a sigh. “Well, I guess I’m talking for the both of us. My name is agent Haynes, I was transferred down from Central last night. Beautiful country out here.” He pauses for her response.

She slowly wraps her hand around the styrofoam, feeling the warmth against her palm.

“So,” he says, clearing his throat. “Your friends call you ‘Mama’, and I’m guessing I’m pretty far from being considered a friend, so. Miss Cobb, I know you’ve been a guest of the department of unexplained phenomena for several weeks now, and I understand you’ve been somewhat… _recalcitrant_. I was brought in because I excel at helping people... be more helpful.”

Torture. Her eyes flicker over to the briefcase, and there’s a rush of white noise in her ears - her face and hands are cold, numb, her breath seizing in her chest, whole body going tense with the effort of staying perfectly still. She knows how to panic silently. When it passes, he’s raised his voice.

“- Amnesty Lodge is closed for business, in fact, the whole topside of town is under lock and key. Wherever you’re hiding, whatever you know about the archway, about what happened to Mt. Kepler, about the entities you were providing safe haven to… It’s only a matter of time before we figure it out. Or, you could just tell me, right now. You could explain to me why you designated yourself the sole warden of planet Earth, and I can expedite your release _so fast_ you could take that coffee to go, still hot!”

She inhales, slowly, exhales. Makes sure her voice comes out strong, steady. “I’ll tell you what I told everyone else. You answer me one question and I’ll tell you what you wanna know. What happened to all my guests at Amnesty Lodge?”

He looks at her for a long moment, purses his lips. “Turn off the feeds,” he calls over his shoulder. “Look,” he tells her, folding his hands on the table. “We don’t know. The inn was stripped clean by the time the FBI arrived. I mean, we found the bat cave you had going on in the cellar, but nobody was there.”

Better than she’d thought. One can go over a plan and run drills until it’s like a well oiled machine, but until it’s been battle tested you never know if it’s going to work. Throw everything into the cars, set fire to some paperwork, wipe down everything for fingerprints if you have time, run. “Well, alright then,” she says, and for a minute she thinks about being _recalcitrant_ again, because none of that is real information, but she’s… she’s just so, so exhausted. She’s ready to have someone else take it off of her hands, leave this place. She can’t go back to the Lodge, not really - it won’t be the same with no one there, just her own footsteps, the residual energy of the residents bouncing off the walls, emptiness ringing clear as a bell. It’d put everyone in danger, besides. The FBI will be watching her until she’s cold in the ground.

“Alright, yeah,” Mama tells him. “I’ve been keeping this a secret for a few decades now. And Haynes,” She puts her palms flat on the table, gently, shakes her head. “It’s got me _real_ tired. So, it was about a year ago now that things started to change. You know what, I’ll give you the usual spiel.”

He looks at her when she finishes, his expression flickering subtly - frustration, anxiety, the barest hint of fear. “There is... a _great deal_ you’re telling me that wasn’t included in Agent Stern’s reports,” he says, “So either he’s _truly incompetent_ or he has some reason to hide this from us.”

She laughs. Sorry Stern. “Agent Haynes!” She waves a hand, grinning, mocking. “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He glares at her. “Then maybe you can illuminate me about something else. The collapse of Mt. Kepler wasn’t the only supernatural activity in the area that day. The Green Bank Telescope also came under attack from an inhuman being. Conveniently, the security footage from that day has gone missing, but a security guard stationed there described the being as a gross ball of flesh, which eventually disintegrated to reveal a four-armed angel made of light. This being came and tried to escape through holes that just opened up out of nowhere. Sounds… fantastical, but so does the peak of a mountain being ripped from its base, so I’m willing to entertain _any_ theories you might have about these beings.”

She didn’t know about the telescope, but it sure sounds like the abomination had made it all the way over there. She drums her fingers against the table. Stern’s not been fired, and it seems like he might be taking her advice, but it could still go either way.

“You know, I’ve killed me _a lot_ of abominations these past thirty years or so, Agent Haynes,” she tells him. She feels awake now, knowing her residents are, at the very least, not in FBI custody. Like she might actually have a chance. The feeling of strength isn’t quite back - the _I can do anything_ fire banked for now, but there’s still heat under the ashes. She leans forward slightly, to show him she’s not cowed, smiling when he leans back just a _fraction_ of an inch. “And I’m sure with the full weight of the United States government behind ya, you could take down a lot more! But these light people?” she laughs. “I suspect they’re… a little bit above your pay grade.”

He thanks her for her time, picking up his briefcase and leaving with the same calculated quickness as before.

She passes Stern on her way to another cell. “Good to see you ain’t been fired yet!” she calls out after him. He doesn’t look back, but she knows she doesn’t imagine the little extra bounce in his step. This is the most she’s talked in days.

She sits in her new room, feels her heart beating, tests the bend and flex of her ankles, stretches herself out slowly, does a few push-ups. She’s got to start prepping for the next hunt - she'll barehand it out of here if she has to when all hell breaks loose. The two month break is almost up.

She has a feeling that this one might be the last.

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this in ten days because i love mama a whole lot. PLEASE let me know if you enjoyed. i WILL cry i worked so fucking hard on this and it would make my day even if you just comment like "good job"
> 
> If you are ever arrested, invoke your right to an attorney (be sure to say that you are invoking your right to an attorney and your right to stay silent) and DO NOT speak to the police until your lawyer arrives. Being denied a lawyer is illegal. Police, the fbi, etc are NOT your friends and DO NOT have your interests in mind. Even if you are innocent, they will do their best to spin it onto you. Do not talk back to them, do not quip, do not try to explain yourself. Get a lawyer and stay silent. ACAB.
> 
> I love you all. you can find me on tumblr @ themlet if you have questions.


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